Slowly, slowly, slowly….

In the past seven days I’ve watched plenty of Wimbledon tennis, walked Buttercup several times, and have managed a fair bit of sewing.

Haze from the County Fire in Lake County turned the sunset a gorgeous peach on the 3rd of July.

I made a baby comforter, basted how many hexies, cut squares for future quilts.

I considered titling this post The Hexies of Forgetfulness; it was so easy to baste while vegging out to tennis matches.

I’ve done much thinking, about various subjects, even a little about the next possible novels, several plot points having entered my consciousness.

Some machine quilting took place, waves along the solid blue.

I’ve washed laundry and dishes, written cards, and cut my husband’s hair. I baked apricot bars due to the abundance having fallen from our tree.

And of course Buttercup napped….

And I took communion for the first time in weeks, which was particularly healing.

For all these tasks and accomplishments, everything has felt achieved in manners so ponderous, I wonder if time is trying to balance itself from the swiftness of June. It’s only the ninth of July, but it feels like…. Should it be the end of the month, or the beginning? Wimbledon is a set two weeks, and today was Manic Monday, but even that event colours how time has been altered; we’re eight hours behind the UK, so as the sun sets there, it’s still high in the sky here.

What does that mean?

My hubby was off all of last week, but today he’s at work, and I’ve kept busy with more laundry, snapping a new quilt, contemplating mopping the kitchen. Writing this post supersedes the housecleaning, ha ha, but it’s just one thirty in the afternoon. Buttercup naps most of the day, so she won’t get in the road. An odd stillness surrounds me like a protective bubble. Only a ticking clock permeates the quiet.

She wandered into my photo shoot this morning, bless her heart.

Is this how grieving works, not always tearfully, but in a kind of bumping-about way, as towels are hung on the line, my coffee pot drying in the drainer, games turning into sets that form matches won and lost…. And when Wimbledon is over, so will half of July as well, and then another week will pass and Mom will have been dead an entire month.

Life beyond the here and now has never seemed closer, has never felt so certain. Maybe it’s being in my fifties, or that I’m a grandma three times over. Suddenly a veil has been lifted, a peek into what comes next subduing all my moments, and even in what should be an innocuous action, Mom pops into my head, as if I could again hold her hand.

In the photo above, a purple hexie was basted with red thread; I did several of those at Mom’s, probably on her last Sunday at home. She napped for much of that day, having been a chatty Cathy on Saturday, when Justify won the Triple Crown. When I completed sewing this hexie together, that red thread caught my eye, taking me back exactly one month ago today. I sat to Mom’s left, my two other sisters on the sofa to her right. We watched a race with no clue to the one we all were already in, facing the last turn. Our lives were altering as we laughed together, but time doesn’t stop. In fact, the older I get, the more quickly it moves, except for right now.

I’m being jostled within a strange bubble. And when it finally pops, what then?